Home > Storage > Data Storage Essentials > AppSync > Dell AppSync: Integration with Oracle Database Server > Value proposition
AppSync allows customers to select the Oracle objects to copy, provides steps to copy, mounts the copies, and recover the copies. To perform this process, AppSync helps you define the various workflows through a UI, command-line interface, or through REST API commands. The copy management options differ based on types of use cases or required workflows. The following sections outline three possible scenarios and the value proposition that AppSync offers with each scenario.
At its core, AppSync as a product enables quick and reliable protection of vital application data. AppSync helps create consistent copies of databases useful for proactively preparing situations where unexpected downtime or disasters occur, and one or more databases must be restored quickly. AppSync offers array-level recovery, but also integrates with the application layer, providing a robust protection solution. Operational recovery means that you can choose and maintain a series of copies on the array and then select a restore operation for these copies. This solution can offer the lowest recovery time objective (RTO) because you can create, and restore from, many points in time. This streamlined process contrasts with restoring from the traditional nightly backup plan, which would require you to apply excessive amounts of logs for recovery and for extending the recovery process.
Many customers use AppSync to create a copy of a production Oracle database and mount that copy to another host. Then, they run a backup against that mount host to an alternate location other than the primary storage array. This action reduces the load on the production server by offloading the backup processes to a nonproduction mount host.
For this scenario, the copy that is created should be roll-forward capable. This helps to restore the production database later to any point in time using the archived Oracle logs applied after the restore.
Oracle backup technology provides a hot backup mode, which ensures the consistency of the data, even while the database remains online. To support the noninvasive backup use case, customers can choose to create a copy with Oracle online in hot backup mode.
A third use-case workflow is to create copies of the production Oracle database. This ability helps to mount and repurpose the copy for activities such as test and development, offline reporting, performance testing, training, and so on. To accomplish this result, AppSync offers an entire area of the product to create and manage repurposed copies. These copies can be multigenerational, where you can repurpose a first generation or second generation that is removed from production. AppSync can create a copy directly from production, placing the database in hot backup mode as required, and then enables you to create many second-generation copies of that copy. This provides many copies of the same environment, simultaneously. There are many use cases which this ability addresses, such as creating a gold copy, that is not changing under production load, for several developers to reference and refresh from. Another use case for multigeneration copies is data masking, where the first-generation copy is mounted, the sensitive data is masked, and then it is unmounted. Finally, a second-generation copy is created and presented to developers. This action prevents the developers from having access to sensitive data.
We do not recommend creating or refreshing second-generation copies if the first-generation copy has been mounted and recovered. Upon recovery, the data in the first-generation copy undergoes some change. Since a second-generation copy is a storage-level copy (a true crash-consistent copy), it does not involve quiescing of the production database. Any changes made to first generation during recovery can impact the consistency and recovery of the second-generation copy. This scenario usually leads to recovery failures during mounting and recovery of second-generation copies. For this reason, it is also imperative that the first-generation copy is not mounted at the second-generation copy is created.